On 13 Jan 2001 13:42:51 -0500, Warp <war### [at] tagpovrayorg> wrote:

>Peter Popov <pet### [at] vipbg> wrote:
>: RAR is available for DOS, Windows, Mac and *x. What more is there? :)

>  I have zip, rar, lha, gzip and bzip2 (and other less known)
>compression/decompression and arj decompression software in this machine
>(I think they are all generic unix programs).

>  I think that's mostly enough.

I meant, what more was there, OS-wise :)
I also have uc3, yac, ain, 

>  (Btw, bzip2 compresses better in almost every case and faster in most
>cases than any of the other compression softwares; I wonder why it isn't
>more popular in Windows systems...)

The best compressor I've seen, compression-wise, is yac (Yet Another
Compressor). It was incredibly slow to compress, though (decompression
speed was normal). It was designed for BBS mail (anyone remember Blue
Wave? :) ) as it could do successive archiving. It was great as it
could only send you the part of the archive that you didn't have and
would join it seamlessly with your archive, regardless if the data
inside was a single file which has changed or many little files. It
was great at tracking changes.

ZIP ruled the DOS world until ARJ came out. After that RAR and UC2
offered better compression and AIN was basically a fast ARJ (with a
bit lower compression). ZIP came back with the invasion of the
Internet and long file names and Winzip seems to rule the Windows
world now. RAR is still used for downloads but you will mostly find it
in crackz/warez sites (I don't know why). As of bzip2... well... bzip2
is best at text files (as is lha, I've never seen anything better that
lha for compressing large volumes of ASCII) so that might have
something to do with it. I am not sure if it needs a 32-it envoronment
or large amounts of memory (like 1MB for a hash table / dictionary)
but that would explain why it was mostly *x-only for a long time.


Peter Popov ICQ : 15002700
Personal e-mail : pet### [at] vipbg
TAG      e-mail : pet### [at] tagpovrayorg

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